Death as a Subject for Reflection

Abstract

Reflections of a human being, facing inevitable death, has become central to literary focus only by the end of the XIXth century – in Leo Tolstoy’s late masterpiece, The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886). This work has found response in Vazha-Pshavela’s story, dated 1889, “The Death of Bagrat Zakharich.” Vazha gave the answers to the eternal dilemma of human life to the characters of his great poems, while Bagrat Zakharich, unlike Ivan Ilych, he did not spare, for in this character he depicted the dreary cold-heartedness of a Russified Georgian statesman, a phenomenon that he himself had often witnessed.